A Single Nuke Could Destroy America

by Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen - March 29th, 2009 - Newsmax

A sword of Damocles hangs over our heads. It is a real threat that has been all but ignored.

[snip]

Far too many timid or uninformed sources maintain that a single launch of a missile poses no true threat to the United States, given our retaliatory power.

A reality check is in order and must be discussed in response to such an absurd claim: In fact, one small nuclear weapon, delivered by an ICBM can destroy the United States by maximizing the effect of the resultant electromagnetic pulse upon detonation.

[snip]

In fact, it would take only one to three weapons exploding above the continental United States to wipe out our entire grid and transportation network. It might take years to recover from, if ever.

This is not science fiction.

The problem we currently face is that America has a global socialist President who really does not think that we will be attacked by our enemies. He is convinced that all opposition to America is retaliatory based on his delusions of our bad actions (as he sees them). Like most global socialists, he thinks that the islamo-fascists, being socialists too, will welcome his efforts to subvert American sovereignty. This delusion is based on his failure to understand, the Islamo-fascists are not motivated by a better standard of living wrenched from the rich. Their motivation is dominance. No matter how much Obama "reaches out" to Iran, they will slap him down, as they did with his first efforts. They do not want to be "left alone", but to defeat us.

Obama was surprised by their reaction to his efforts at reconciliation because he does not have a clue about their true motivations. He is naive and arrogant at the same time. That combination can and will lead to disaster if we do not start to prepare for the coming war.

Israel Given Arab Ultimatum

Arab League tells Israel: Accept Saudi initiative now or never

by Yoav Stern - March 30th, 2009 - Haaretz

The draft proposal was formulated by the Arab foreign ministers, and will be presented to the Arab League's leaders Monday for approval.

The wording is a compromise between the hardline Arab countries, mainly Syria and Qatar, and the moderates, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

It is not really the Saudi initiative. It is a more coercive initiative carying the Saudi label. What it really means is that the radicals of Hamas will dominate Palestine and dictate to Israel what they will have to pay to be allowed to live, at least for a while. Long term Israel is no more. The election of Obama has started a process that will lead to nuclear war.

My Manhattan Project

by Michael Osinski - March 29th, 2009 - New York Magazine

The first collateralized mortgage obligation, or CMO, was created in 1983 by First Boston and Salomon Brothers, but it would be years before computer technology advanced sufficiently to allow the practice to become widespread. Massive databases were required to track every mortgage in the country. You needed models to create the intricate network of bonds based on the homeowners’ payments, models to predict prepayment rates, and models to predict defaults. You needed the Internet to sail these bonds back and forth across the world, massaging their content to fit an investor’s needs at a moment’s notice. Add to all this the complacency, greed, entitlement, and callous stupidity that characterized banks in post-2001 America, and you have a recipe for disaster.

This is an excellent article to read if you want to understand how separated from serving free enterprise and capitalism Wall Street has become. The greatest threat to human freedom has become the delusion that Wall Street IS capitalism or free enterprise, due to the hatred for the corruption of Wall Street that has become a part of the culture of liberals. Libertarians and conservatives should despise Wall Street with even greater virulence since it is a more of an afront to our values than it is to the socialists of the left.

In actuality, Wall Street has as much to do with capitalism as fraud has to do with banking. Just because someone puts the money they defrauded someone out of in a bank, does not mean that the banker is guilty of fraud. Just because scam artists and charlatans sell financial instruments that represent a business, does not mean they are a part of free enterprise or capitalism.

The process by which CMO (Collateralized Mortgage Obligations) and CDS (Credit Default Swaps) were used to con people into paying too much money for these pieces of paper, does not make it business. Business is the creation of products that people use. Tangible items. The relationship of financial instruments to the underlying asset or obligation must be clear. In these instruments they are not.

Though capitalism is awkward without a financial industry like banking, it is still possible. It is done with barter. That financial instruments make it easier to conduct the barter process, removing the necessity of taking delivery of cumbersome things like cows or coats when they are simply intermediary transactions, does not mean that the financial instruments represent actual business. They are a process to facilitate business. Unfortunately that distinction has been lost to many, even many who work on Wall Street.

As you read this article it becomes clear. The writer sees what he did as capitalism, and he has lost respect for capitalism as a result. It was never capitalism. It was always a corruption of the financial process of facilitating capitalism.

There are three different types of financial firms that facilitate various aspects of capitalism. These are banks, insurance and security firms. The transactions they facilitate are not complex just because they are abstract. Whenever any one of these organizations start creating complex processes to pervert the transactions they are charged with for the purpose of increasing their fees, it is not capitalism. It is fraud.

I am still frustrated by the huge number of supposedly smart people in our nation who do not understand the difference between capitalism and financial entities. Money is an abstract creation. Because it is susceptible to fraud, government usually takes over and creates a currency to facilitate both capitalism ... and the payment of taxes and fees that government needs. That it works for either type of transaction, does not make it capitalism. Therein lies the confusion.

Capitalism is aided by the creation of honest and responsible entities that; handle a sound currency; smooth disruptions to the business cycle caused by risks such as fire, flood, etc.; and allow for sharing in the creation or sale of a business in parts. When these three disparate financial functions are merged into a single entity, it is always followed by the perversion of their duties and financial collapse. Go back to the great depression and you find the merged and conflicting financial duties from failing to separate these functions was a major contributing factor to the sysstemic collapse.

You have to ask then why we removed those reasonable restrictions in the late 90s and went back to the merged financial firm model that failed before? I also wonder how much we can blame these monolithic financial firms for the creation of the complex instruments which are at the heart of our current crisis? With the corruption of Wall Street (as currently practiced in the crony capitalism model of big government partnering with monoplies to extort profits), why are libertarians and conservatives unable to shed their outdated belief that Wall Street means capitalism?

A Whiff Of Fascism From Obama's White House

by Matthew Vadum - March, 29th, 2009 - American Spectator

Reports say that the head of GM is quitting under duress from the Obama administration ...

As Mussolini said, "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."

For the president of the United States to be able to, effectively, fire the head of a major corporation is not a road America has ever headed down before.

Then no "community organizer" with an Alinsky style hatred for free enterprise has ever been President before.

The most amusing aspect of the entire auto bailout process, or shutdown, is where Obama promises to "stand behind" anyone who buys a car during the reorganization period. I wonder who will do the work, the post office? Or does Obama really mean what he says. That he will "stand behind" them so he can watch them suffer. With his avowed Alinsky plan to deceive people into hating capitalism, that would be the better tactic.

What this proves more than anything else is the total disconnect between the real world and Obama's view of the world. He sees the financial leaders of banks and brokerage firms as people he needs to do business with. He sees no value to real producers of goods, like the auto companies, except as they provide jobs for unions. The disconnect could not be more obvious. He fires a man who has done an incredible job of restructuring GM, cutting their bloated work force in half, while refusing to fire a single head of a bank.

Regulation, Globally Speaking

by Mark Steyn - March 30th, 2009 - Washington Times

Writing in the Chicago Tribune last week, President Obama fell back on one of his favorite rhetorical tricks: "But I also know," he wrote, "that we need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our people or any people."

Really? For the moment, it's a "false choice" mainly in the sense that he's not offering it: "a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism" is not on the menu, which leaves "an oppressive government-run economy" as pretty much the only game in town.

[snip]

In their first two months, Mr. Obama and Mr. Geithner have done nothing but vaporize your wealth and your children's future. What began as an economic crisis is now principally a political usurpation. And, to return to the president's "false choice," that "chaotic and unforgiving capitalism" is exactly what we need right now. It's the quickest, cheapest, fairest, most efficient route to economic stabilization and renewal. A regimented and eternally forgiving global command economy with no moral hazard will destroy us all.

It is clear that Barack Obama has grandiose plans. He is not satisfied with just being President of the United States. He has delusions of being Emporer of the World.

Socialist Tyranny Through Alinsky Tactics

Barack Obama is bankrupting America intentionally and using every trick in the Alinsky book to make it happen.

Budget Reconciliation As 'Act Of Violence'? by Liz Halloran

Reconciliation is a powerful, 25-year-old procedural maneuver that allows for the passage of a budget by a simple majority vote rather than the usual 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster.

As it's playing out now in Congress, "reconciliation" is — take your pick — an indispensable tool for majority Democrats to protect parts of their budget from a filibuster by Senate Republicans; or, in the words of a currently out-of-power GOP Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, an "act of violence."

It is an act of violence. It is well known that European style socialist economies (or neo-socialist if you want to constrain our use of the socialist label with 19th century definitions) have an inherent unemployment more than double the traditional free enterprise unemployment rates. I think it can honestly be called violence to condemn millions of Americans to joblessness under the fiction that they deserve a free ride. It is not a free ride to be dependent on government goons for your ability to live. That is what socialism really accomplishes.

If you have any doubt, just look at what a liberal newspaper in Michigan thinks of the Obama plan.

Obama's budget will devastate Michigan - Editorial

Nothing would make us happier than to hear that Washington, D.C., is poised to solve what ails our economy. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama's new budget is loaded with additional job-killing programs and spending. For Michigan, it will be just one more kick in the gut.

The president's budget calls for the creation of a "cap-and-trade" program that would actually cap and tax carbon dioxide emissions, resulting in the death of manufacturing jobs across the country. Some have said the "cap- and-trade" plan to trade emissions on Wall Street will "sink Michigan."

North Carolina, which is already up to fourth in the nation in unemployment, will continue to close in on Michigan with this incredible waste of money currently being proposed.

People do not yet seem to have caught on to Obama's duplicity. George W. Bush had a budget deficit last year of almost $500 billion. This was a combination of Bush's incomprehensible indifference to deficits and a DEMOCRAT CONGRESS that spent money like it was free. Bush started the bailout stupidity, but he only spent a portion of the $350 billion congress gave him. Obama, by his own choice, spent another $350 billion, then asked for what is still called a "$787 billion stimulus" even though its actual price tag is closer to $1.5 trillion, every dollar of which is deficit financed. Obama then signed the Democrat congressional budget for the coming year with another $500 billion in deficit spending. Total additional deficits, more than $2 trillion. Obama says all of this is George W. Bush's fault. Obama claims this spending is all "inherited" and promises to cut it in half by the time he leaves office.

Well over half of this deficit was not inherited. It was spent against the wishes of fiscally responsible Republicans and a few fiscally responsible Democrats. It is even arguable that NONE of it is inherited. Obama is flat out lying when he says this was "inherited". However notice the deceit in the promise. He plans to cut an inflated and outrageous deficit level back to twice the worst year in George W. Bush's history. TWICE.

There is still a reality that blacks suffer unemployment more than the nation as a whole. If Obama doubles unemployment, who doubts that this will devastate most black communities in our nation?

In my opinion, Obama is not just being deceitful in the Alinsky mode, he is inflicting tyranny on our poorest citizens.

Why Doesn't Communism Have As Bad A Name As Nazism?

by Dennis Prager - March 24th, 2009 - Front Page Magazine

Given the amount [of] human suffering Communists have caused - 70 million killed in China, 20-30 million in the former Soviet Union, and almost one-third of all Cambodians; the decimation of Tibetan and Chinese culture; totalitarian enslavement of North Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Russians; a generation deprived of human rights in Cuba; and much more -- why is "Communist" so much less a term of revulsion than "Nazi?"

Dennis Prager is often one of our most interesting writers. This is an obvious question and yet one that almost never gets asked. Every liberal (progressive-socialist-communist whatever you want to call denizens of the left) will hurl Nazi at anyone on the right, without a moments hesitation. Forget for a moment the irony that Nazis were government control socialists and therefore more left wing than any conservative has ever been. The evils of communism and socialism have been well documented and certainly equal (if not exceed) the Nazis. So what gives. Dennis has a rational list of the reasons he thinks this is so. It is a good read and worth the time.

Space Storm Alert: 90 Seconds From Catastrophe

by Michael Brooks - March 23rd, 2009 - New Scientist

It is midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a few seconds, electric bulbs dim and flicker, then become unusually bright for a fleeting moment. Then all the lights in the state go out. Within 90 seconds, the entire eastern half of the US is without power.

A year later and millions of Americans are dead and the nation's infrastructure lies in tatters.

Here we go again with the technology is our enemy brigades. It is of course our politicians who are determined that for reason's of NIMBY opposition to electrical generating stations, we must build this huge grid that EFFICIENTLY moves electrical power everywhere. This is a problem not of technology, but left wing Democrat subversion of intelligent planning.

Democrats always want government to plan everything, and yet here we have a situation where "efficient planning" dramatically increases our exposure to a disaster. Unfortunately, since electrical wires have to get "right of way" permission from the government owners of our roads, it is impossible to separate government from this problem.

Ruling By A Radical

by Melanie Phillips - March 25th, 2009 - Spectator

So Obama’s not just governing but he’s still campaigning. Against whom? [It] can only be Congress and other constitutional elements supposed to act as checks and balances on the Presidency, against which Obama is seeking to recruit the pressure-power of millions of people.

There was also his deeply troubling suggestion during his presidential campaign – which received virtually no attention – of creating a civilian national security force that would be as powerful, strong and well-funded as the half-trillion dollar Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force, although he subsequently refused to elaborate upon this distinctly chilling suggestion (and indeed, according to this report these remarks actually vanished from the published transcript of Obama’s speech).

A few days ago, however, the House of Representatives passed the Orwellian-sounding ‘Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act’ which provides for the introduction of mandatory national service (unspecified) for all young people.

The secrecy and stubborn commitment of Barack Obama to this Alinsky plan for subversion of democracy is frightening. I have previously covered the article by Selwyn Duke, "Fear and the Security force", which addressed this issue immediately after the election. It is not a new fear. What will it take for people to wake up? Will we truly wait until the "brown shirts" are standing at our door before Martin Niemoler's poem comes back to haunt us?

Gordon Gekko Is A Democrat

by Ann Coulter - March 25th, 2009 - Human Events

How did Republicans get saddled with Wall Street? Obama just got the biggest campaign haul from Wall Street in world history, and Republicans still can't shake the public perception that they are tied at the hip to Wall Street bankers who [in reality] hate them.

It's as if National Rifle Association members conspired with Republicans to bankrupt the country and everyone blamed the Democrats for being shills of the NRA.

The term crony capitalism was invented specifically to explain this phenomenon. Wall Street has long since abandoned capitalism and embraced a phony corporate socialism partnership with big government. Yet not only does the general public not notice. Stupid Republicans don't notice either. They still think that Wall Street believes in free enterprise.

They don't!

It is this illusion that Karl Rove and George W. Bush argue requires the Republican Party to adopt the big government crony capitalism model of modern socialism.

Wall Street is offended by the idea that small business exists. They support and only love huge corporations that have bought monopoly control of some market through mergers and acquisitions, with appropriate bribes to Wall Street for funding the process. Monopoly profits are much higher than the profits generated by the competitive free enterprise system.

Free enterprise is the system of individual freedom. Wall Street is the system of crony capitalism, a new variation of socialism based on the corruption of Democrat machines such as has long controlled Chicago and Illinois. We are finally seeing this machine try and take over America.

Ann is correct when she argues that Gordon Gekko, the fictional character from the 1987 film Wall Street by director Oliver Stone, is in the real world, a Democrat.

Ann Coulter is a great writer and fearless. Only a fearless Republican would point out that Wall Street is owned by Democrats. Most leaders of the Republican Party are still afraid that they can't get donations from business if they share that dirty little secret with rank and file Republicans. So it remains a secret. This is one of the issues over which more and more of Republican supporters see our leaders as gutless, but most do not.

Thank you Ann. We need more Republicans to point out the lie that Wall Street means capitalism, or has any relationship to capitalism. It has not for some time. We have got to separate Wall Street from the free enterprise of Small Business. They are incompatible concepts.

Just as the monopolies of the 19th Century had to be ended for our nation to prosper, the monopolies of the 21st Century must be ended for our nation to prosper. Unfortunately the new monopolies are government controlled and the socialists are in bed with the financial rulers of Wall Street. Unless and until the average libertarian and conservative who votes Republican "gets it", Democrats will control Wall Street and blame Republicans for Democrat corruption.

Why Be A Conservative?

by Christopher S. Brownwell - March 25th, 2009 - American thinker

Why would I choose to be a conservative? Why would I choose the persecution? I am constantly ridiculed for my beliefs. I have been compared to Nazis. Liberals call me a sexist, racist, bigoted homophobe. My intentions are mischaracterized, and then I am judged by those mischaracterized intentions. For example, because I favor policies to help get everyone off of welfare to succeed on their own, my intentions are characterized as trying to keep blacks and minorities poor. These liberals then brand me a racist because they perceive my intentions are to keep blacks poor.

Interesting summation of some basic conservative principles. We don't often think of why our founders created the government it created, nor do we often remember their warning that our system would only work for a moral people. I wonder whether that means our system is doomed to end now that secular humanism has ended the moral foundation of our nation?

Dear A.I.G., I Quit!

Editorial - March 24th, 2009 - New York Times

The following is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G.

Dear Mr. Liddy,

It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my decision, I want to offer some context:

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

You can read the rest of this letter at the New York Times. What you will find detailed is a reality that our nation today is governed by demagogues and tyrants, the most despicable of which is our Dear Leader, the Magic Marxist Messiah. A great analysis of the resignation and the bonus issue which triggered it is the commentary of J.G. Thayer, "The Face of Untrammeled Greed". That greed is not the greed of the bonus recipients but the government goons who want to breach the contracts.

America has not until now stood for mob rule. I am disgusted that nearly half the Republicans in congress went along with the contemptible mob rule attempt to steal from private citizens the negotiated compensation they had been promised. It appears that the mob, as usual, were trying to lynch the wrong people. That is what happens during mob rule. The people who the mob were angry at have already left A.I.G. To the Democrats that is irrelevant. They want to hang someone and being "in the area" where the crime took place is all it takes. It doesn't even matter if they are there to clean up after the crime. They are in the area, "Let's hang them!"

Democrats, at the same time, are adamant they are going to go forward with a plan to bail out all the liars who defrauded banks with erroneous loan applications because it will also bail out people who were simply stupid in buying homes they could not afford. The simply stupid are of course Democrat voters.

What happened to my nation? when did the nation of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison become the nation of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro and Joseph Stalin?

I can only hang my head and cry!

GOP Preach Selective Self-Discipline

by Froma Harrop - March 24th, 2009 - Detroit News

Government programs promoted homeownership to people who could not afford to buy a house. And, yes, there were reckless, greedy, lazy and/or dishonest borrowers.

But to the conservative punditry, the true villain was a 1977 law that stopped banks from discriminating against creditworthy homebuyers who lived in minority neighborhoods. The crazy subprime activity didn't go into high gear until almost 30 years later, when most of the bad loans were not subject to Community Reinvestment Act rules. Nonetheless, conservative bullhorns framed the meltdown as some racial preference gone wild.

This is a lie. Froma Harrop steals a page from the Obama deceit handbook and ignores the real reason libertarians and conservatives were incensed about the crisis. In the process she sets up a straw man that libertarians and conservatives DID SOMETHING THEY DID NOT DO and uses that lie to attack her opponents.

The reality is that during the Clinton years the CRA was changed to allow U.S. Attorneys and HUD to threaten criminality to any bank lending officer if they did not meet unrealistic and fraudulent goals of how many loans were required to be made to blacks. Even if blacks were given loans at the exact same standards as whites, a bank officer could be threatened with fascist goon overtones if the same percentage were not approved no matter the credit worthiness of the applicants. If sufficient blacks did not meet the standards, that was ruled racism, not equality of treatment. Essentially loan officers were held accountable for failures in the black community to advance economically as fast as our government deemed appropriate.

The lie that 30 years of the CRA did nothing to help blacks get loans, and that the perception of the law was not altered by the actual changes in the law to allow abuses by government goons, is the latest straw man among the liars of the liberal left. No "conservative bullhorns framed the meltdown as some racial preference gone wild" about a law that had been around for 30 years. There was an abusive use of new rules to blackmail banks into granting bad loans. Why is that not a reasonable complaint? Why will liberals not stick to the truth? Why is a lie always needed to slam conservatives for acts they are not taking?

This changed CRA law was not alone in causing the home boom and bust. Since most of the sub-prime disaster was confined to several states where refinancing to other than minorities created most of the problem, it is not true that libertarians and conservatives complained solely about the CRA contribution. However the liars of the liberal left will never deal with truth. Straw man lies and contemptible mis-statements are always the recourse which allows them to duck their accountability for government corruption that caused an economic disaster in our nation.

Our Nation Is In Serious Trouble

by Dean Stephens - March 23rd, 2009

Over this weekend, and again this morning, there have been a large number of editorials and opinion pieces that have taken Barack Obama to task for his handling of the financial crisis in our nation. His only meaningful response has been to accuse anyone who is unhappy of being partisan and unfair. George Bush started the bailout scenario is his accusation. That seems to be his only defense of continuing to throw money at the economic meltdown. Its George's fault ...

A truly frightening aspect of this crisis is the number of Obama supporters that keep telling us how intelligent and "cool" Obama is and how that inspires them with the idea that appearing "cool" under crisis is the equivalent of having any clue as to how to solve the problem. To some of us, the "cool" response is an indication that Obama doesn't understand the problem.

Here is an example of the idolatry school of Obama worship:

Two months into Barack Obama’s presidency, the country has seen a man with immense political talent. Calm and calculating, the new president possesses a natural ability to lead and a remarkable degree of emotional intelligence. He’s in control of himself; but is he in control of his party?

Like a swan on water, Obama glides gracefully along the surface while below his kicking never stops. So far, the kicking has hit only Republicans. Not long after assuming office, the president waved and smiled as he entered a Capitol Hill meeting with congressional Republicans. Once the doors were closed, he taunted them that “I won” and then mocked them for listening to Rush Limbaugh.

That might sound great to a partisan Republican hating Democrat. Just exactly how is it supposed to bring us together as a nation to solve this problem? Even so, the article goes on to suggest that Obama might want to confront his base and reach out to Republicans on this. There is that little issue that Democrats may be okay at running government, but they are not noted for understanding how business works. Does anyone expect that Obama would ever do something like chastise his base?

Here is an example of how business is viewing the Obama regime:

There are growing indications that the Obama administration is melting down, unraveling and falling apart. The clearest indication is Barack Obama and his treasury secretary failing to come up with a plan to fix the bank/credit crisis. He is proposing solutions for every social problem ever identified by liberal Democrats, but doesn’t seem to be dealing with what should be his No. 1 priority. The bank fix is supposed to be announced by Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, during this week.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, but the early days of the Obama administration will be remembered for his picking NCAA basketball tournament winners, appearing on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and making fun of special needs children — while the American economy is burning.

The conclusion of business is that the Obama regime is simply not up to the task. Even though Tim Geithner is a Republican, he is not a person that anyone in the Republican Party would pick for such a senior strategy position as Treasury Secretary. His expertise is in tactical implementation of well known technical issues within banking. Nothing indicates that Geithner has the creative genius to invent an effective solution to dealing with the current situation. The crisis cries out for someone who can look at the repeated failures of throwing money at the problem and yell "STOP"!

Here Obama pledges, as he once did with his racist pastor, to have total confidence in the tax cheat Geithner:

President Barack Obama told CBS News’ “60 Minutes” yesterday that he still has confidence in his embattled Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, and would refuse his resignation if it were offered. Not only is that clearly the wrong answer concerning the President’s most important cabinet appointment, it is also the latest and most disturbing evidence that the Obama administration is approaching political meltdown.

You cannot believe that he really means it after he has abandoned so many of his supporters in the past. What this pledge means to most people is that Obama must be close to throwing Geithner under the bus. Who then will solve the problems our nation faces?

Here is one respected journalist asking a serious question about his failures:

“You're sitting here. And you're— you are laughing. You are laughing about some of these problems. Are people going to look at this and say, ‘I mean, he's sitting there just making jokes about money—’ How do you deal with— I mean: explain. . .” [Steve] Kroft [of 60 Minutes] asked at one point.

“Are you punch-drunk?” Kroft [asked].

Let us hope his handling of the crisis to date is not a signal Obama does not have a clue and he is simply going to allow Geithner, and our nation, to twist in the wind.

The Totalitarian Impulse

by Bradley R. Gitz - March 22nd, 2009 - Arkansas Democrat Gazette (Northwest Arkansas News)

Euphemisms tend to be a tip-off of obnoxious intent. Those who resort to such linguistic deception do so because they don't want anyone grasping the real meaning behind what they propose.

So it is with two of the more appalling ideas making their way onto the Democratic Party agenda.

The first is the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act, which is actually nothing of the sort. Labor union goons want to get rid of the secret ballot to make it easier to intimidate workers into joining unions.

[snip]

So, too, with the so-called Fairness Doctrine, the precise purpose of which is to restrict speech that liberal Democrats don't like. More specifically, those Democrats in Congress who wish to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine wish to kill talk radio.

This article is one of the best summations I have read of two truly abhorrent policies of the new Obama socialist regime. Nothing is more blatantly indicative of the "double speak" described in the novel "1984" than these two planned power grabs with innocuous titles. I highly recommend the article.

The Myth Of The 46 Million

by Philip Klein - March 20th, 2009 - American Spectator

Whether it's in political speeches, commentary, newspaper features, or hard news stories, the statistic of 46 million uninsured is one of the most-widely cited numbers in the health care debate. It promotes the idea that nearly one out of every six Americans does not have access to health care and it plays into the arguments of those calling for massive expansion of government to fix the problem. Yet the ubiquitous figure is highly misleading.

A few breakdowns of note in this hypothetical huge number of 46 million:
9 million make more than $75,000 per year and could easily choose to have health care but have made a conscious decision not to.
10 million are not Americans, they are illegal aliens.
14 million are eligible for EXISTING FREE government insurance programs but have not had a single medical problem worth going to the hospital for and have thus not bothered to register.
18 million are under 34, extremely healthy, and have chosen not to pay for health care which they never need.

There is a real number of people with medical problems who make too much to get government assistance but not enough to pay for health insurance. That number? A little under 9 million. These are the only people that we should allow government programs to address. Someone making $75,000 a year does not deserve government assistance to get insurance, or need some socialist politician saying that they should be forced to do so.

There are many problems with health care but those who start the debate with a LIE are not going to fix the problems when they have to cover up their LIES with solutions that appear to fix them.

Naked Short Sales Hint Fraud In Bringing Down Lehman

by Gary Matsumoto - March 19th, 2009 - Bloomberg News

As Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. struggled to survive last year, as many as 32.8 million shares in the company were sold and not delivered to buyers on time as of Sept. 11, according to data compiled by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Bloomberg. That was a more than 57-fold increase over the prior year’s peak of 567,518 failed trades on July 30.

The SEC has linked such so-called fails-to-deliver to naked short selling, a strategy that can be used to manipulate markets. A fail-to-deliver is a trade that doesn’t settle within three days.

“We had another word for this in Brooklyn,” said Harvey Pitt, a former SEC chairman. “The word was ‘fraud.’”

From the ascendancy of Robert Rubin in the Clinton Days, the growing use of government rules to empower the most egregious crimes by Wall Street has ended free enterprise and turned it in to legal stealing. For 70 years naked short selling was a crime. Then that was ended. Why is anyone surprised that the trigger for our huge financial meltdown was naked short selling by corrupt members of Wall Street? Anyone suspect the master of market manipulation (the man who brought down the British Pound), George Soros, was behind it?

Producing Panic In America's Allies

by Amir Taheri - March 17th, 2009 - The New York Post

The Obama administration has offered to talk to America's enemies across the globe, especially in the Middle East. So far, though, the offer has few takers.

[snip]

Well, if your enemies won't talk to you, why not talk to your friends? But this is precisely what the new administration doesn't want to do - for that would look like continuing the Bush administration's "failed policies."

For those who doubt that a nuclear bomb in Tel Aviv will signal the start of the real shooting phase of World War IV, this article is one they will wish to ignore. The speed with which the Barack Obama regime has empowered the anti-American forces in the Middle East, and thus subverted our allies among the pro-democracy forces, is simply amazing. More and more the word that comes to mind when thinking of the Obama regime is not just amateurs, but incompetence.

Electing A Child To Be President

by Alan Caruba - March 17th, 2009 - Canada Free Press

Obama may be our first President with Attention Deficit Disorder. He went from declaring we faced an economic “catastrophe” to saying the economy was still strong in just over a month. Maybe that accounts for his dependence on the TelePrompter which, we’re told, goes everywhere he does.

We’re watching an already long list of fatally flawed decisions and I suggest that we are looking at a combination of his socialist ideology, his youth and inexperience, and a narcissism that cannot tolerate criticism no matter its source.

His greatest support comes from a younger generation of Americans with virtually no knowledge of the nation’s history, no grasp of the economic issues affecting it, and no more political insight than to rely on “hope and change” without understanding that these are not, nor ever were sufficient to the task of being in charge of a great nation with great challenges.

Politically, emotionally, and intellectually, Barack Hussein Obama is a child. This has become increasingly evident with every passing day.

If you try to point out the issues raised in this article to anyone who supports Barack Obama, especially among the young, it will get you an outraged vicious verbal attack that is simply beyond belief. Having been brainwashed from their earliest days in school with the premise that America is evil and the cause of every flaw in the known universe, they have been told and believe socialism is the only cure to our transgressions. Thus they are incapable of seeing anything wrong with what the Magic Marxist Messiah is doing.

The Real AIG Outrage

Editorial - March 17th, 2009 - Wall Street Journal (Opinion Journal)

Given that the government has never defined "systemic risk," we're also starting to wonder exactly which system American taxpayers are paying to protect. It's not capitalism, in which risk-takers suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And in some cases it's not even American. The U.S. government is now in the business of distributing foreign aid to offshore financiers, laundered through a once-great American company.

The politicians also prefer to talk about AIG's latest bonus payments because they deflect attention from Washington's failure to supervise AIG. The Beltway crowd has been selling the story that AIG failed because it operated in a shadowy unregulated world and cleverly exploited gaps among Washington overseers. Said President Obama yesterday, "This is a corporation that finds itself in financial distress due to recklessness and greed." That's true, but Washington doesn't want you to know that various arms of government approved, enabled and encouraged AIG's disastrous bet on the U.S. housing market.

George W. Bush will go down in history as the fiscally irresponsible buffoon who started this crony capitalism bailout. But Barack Obama will not avoid his own culpability by saying, "Don't blame me - Bush did it first, whine whine ..."

I am convinced though that Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley has gone further than anyone. Nigel Duara reported he "suggested that AIG executives should take a Japanese approach toward accepting responsibility for the collapse of the insurance giant by resigning or killing themselves ..."

"I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed," Grassley said. "But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.

"And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology."

Wow. Can anyone remember an American Senator demanding that private citizens who have committed no crime commit suicide because they did something unpopular with politicians? People inside AIG who know say that the people who created the problem have long since fled. The people left are trying to clean up the mess. One claim is that this group have reduced the AIG obligations by more than a trillion dollars as a result their work. If true, why would anyone dispute giving them a thousandth of that for their work? Isn't that a whole lot better than taxpayers paying that trillion dollars? What is needed is less demogoguery and more knowledge by both politicians and the mob in the street.

The issue that still keeps being ignored is the criticism that George Soros started the collapse to get Barack Obama elected. There is evidence of that but so far no one is being permitted to investigate. Even George Bush and his co-conspirators Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke seem unwilling to find out if that is true. I wonder why?

The Obama Pledge

by Thomas Lifson - March 16th, 2009 - The American Thinker

Another polarizing move from Barack Obama. His permanent campaign is organizing a political organization loyal to him, bound by a pledge, outside the government and existing party apparatus. The historical precedents are ominous. Only this time around the Obama organization supplies YouTube videos on how to organize, and social networking software connects them.

Steve Gilbert was among the first to point it out:

Anyone who is a student of totalitarian regimes, especially Nazi Germany, should recognize this tactic. Mr. Obama has organized his own cadre of Brown Shirts (or, if you prefer, Red Shirts) to agitate for his agenda.

During the campaign a number of people who were outraged by the openly fascist orientation of Obama's campaign, warned America of what this man would do.

America is facing a rough few years. If we do not act fast, America as we know it may be a thing of the past.

Why The GOP Can't Win With Minorities

by Shelby Steele - March 16, 2009 - The Wall Street Journal

Today conservatism is stigmatized in our culture as an antiminority political philosophy. In certain quarters, conservatism is simply racism by another name. And minorities who openly identify themselves as conservatives are still novelties, fish out of water.

Yet there is now the feeling that without an appeal to minorities, conservatism is at risk of marginalization. The recent election revealed a Republican Party -- largely white, male and Southern -- seemingly on its way to becoming a "regional" party. Still, an appeal targeted just at minorities -- reeking as it surely would of identity politics -- is anathema to most conservatives. Can't it be assumed, they would argue, that support of classic principles -- individual freedom and equality under the law -- constitutes support of minorities?

Mr. Steele goes on to explain why white guilt is justified and must be dealt with. He continuously cloaks his assumption in the argument that because some in America felt we lost moral authority, the grievances are justified to them. He bases this on the assumption that everyone who loves America is guilty of the actions of a white minority from hundreds of years ago because they got their way for a while and slavery remained legal as a result. They even extend that guilt to a claim we are guilty for actions of whites that took place outside our borders and hundreds of years before our nation came in to being. Meanwhile their position ignores moral actions by the white majority that ultimately ended slavery in our nation. The only actions which can be looked at are actions for which we must be guilty, according to the white guilt proponents.

A little historical reminder. The majority of nations in the world practiced slavery at the time it was practiced here in America. Does anyone think that the blacks in every other nation in Central and South America came here as free immigrants? However even in those days, there was a moral outrage against it here in America. There was not a majority consensus in favor of slavery. The unity needed to assure the United States did not have British colonies and armed forces both to our North and to our South, meant that the newly forming nation accepted slave states as a compromise. The slave states had within their individual borders a majority backing slavery, but not within the nation. Even within the slave states it was not universal and a significant minority opposed it. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but did not think it was moral. It was legal, and so he accepted it, but he did not think it was moral. This is well documented as was the opposition of other founding fathers (see article here). He was not alone among Southerners ready to end the institution at the time our nation was formed.

More than half our nation opposed slavery and supported the abolition movement. When it was clear that opposition was growing and slavery was ultimately going to be abolished here in America, the slave states pulled out to maintain their evil institution. Who can forget the prescient observation of Abraham Lincoln that America "cannot endure premanently half slave and half free" in his great "house divided" speech. the concluding sentence in that speech is what the slavers feared. Lincoln correctly said "Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay, but sooner or later the victory is sure to come." Our nation fought a Civil War for unity, because Abraham Lincoln and his supporters in the Republican Party believed that the minority of United States citizens who were in those states should not be denied our freedom. The promise of freedom inherent in our unique form of government was considered more important than the lives of our citizens. Hundreds of thousands of white Americans died to end slavery so that unity could be restored.

Nothing of this is included in Steele's arguments. Honkey hating blacks never admit that any of this is true. To them whites are evil. To them, no white has ever stood up to end slavery. Period. End of discussion. Their next thought is now let's talk about why blacks deserve to take everything that any honkey owns. That is justice to most blacks today. Unfortunately a great number of whites have bought in to this attack whose sole intention is to create white guilt.

For thousands of years, ethnic grievance has been the driving force in wars. The idea that all whites will accept this concept of white guilt for actions by a minority of whites from hundreds of years ago is ridiculous. When you combine this demand for white guilt with a demand for socialism, the political alignment currently ruling our nation, you are asking for a new form of slavery. Socialism is slavery and has been resisted wherever it has been attempted. It represents a repudiation of "freedom" and individual liberty on which our nation was founded.

I do not believe it is possible to ever persuade most blacks alive today that their demands are immoral. The self righteous belief that ALL whites owe ALL blacks is too intertwined in black culture. Even most blacks among those who usually support conservatism are not immune to the self interest it justifies. The overwhelming majority of black Republicans abandoned the Republican party and voted for Barack Obama. They chose "black" over "freedom". With that example in mind, who seriously believes that the Republican Party can stay a party of freedom if it abandons its principles?

I believe that Steele is right, even if it is for reasons he did not express. Conservatives will not feel this illusory "innocence" by abandoning our belief in individual liberty. Conservatives are wasting their time in reaching out to blacks when we have to embrace socialism to satisfy their demands.

Global Warming's No Longer Happening

So why are eco types moaning about record highs while ignoring record lows?

by Lorne Gunter - March 15, 2009 - The Edmonton Journal

So far this month, at least 14 major weather stations in Alberta have recorded their lowest-ever March temperatures. I'm not talking about daily records; I mean they've recorded the lowest temperatures they've ever seen in the entire month of March since temperatures began being recorded in Alberta in the 1880s.

This past Tuesday, Edmonton International Airport reported an overnight low of -41.5 C, smashing the previous March low of -29.4 C set in 1975. Records just don't fall by that much, but the airport's did. Records are usually broken fractions of degrees. The International's was exceeded by 12 degrees.

130 year RECORD lows! Why haven't you heard about this? Al Gore would have any anthropogenic global warming supporter murdered in their sleep if they dare even whisper about any evidence that the chicken little enviro extremists have been exposed as liars. However that is exactly what has happened. 130 year RECORD lows!

The writer of this article simply excuses them for being selective in their interpretation of data. I am an old fashioned country boy and I call it differently. I say these global warming fanatics are power hungry liars.

As an example, Polar Bears are increasing in number as the climate warms up. Yet these liars are running TV ads insisting the polar bear is going extinct. What evidence do they have? PROJECTIONS they have made. NOT EVIDENCE. PROJECTIONS. Not unbiased projections either. Their projections. No wonder they are in a panic to shut down any assessment of what is happening. They need you to believe there is a consensus they are right so the fact they are liars does not become well known.

Can you imagine the criticism that would be directed at me if I "projected" that an Ice Age was coming and then ran TV ads claiming my projection was gospel truth? I would be justifiably ridiculed. So why are they allowed to get away with these lies?

Don't get lost in their lies. They hate mankind and want mankind to be blamed for everything. In truth, whether the climate warms up or cools down, cheap energy is what makes life easy and drives economic expansion. We need cheap energy. Since there is absolutely no truth to the idiocy that carbon dioxide causes global warming, we need to DRILL BABY DRILL. That is not a political opinion. That is the desire of a man who wants to be comfortable in his old age ... and see our children comfortable in their old age.

Failure to drill will be a disaster worse than anything the global warming fanatics have ever envisioned, no matter what. Our planet has never stopped cycling between exteme cold and extreme warmth. We better be ready for either, and that takes ENERGY.

Using Embryos Without Limit Is Line Too Far

by Charles Krauthammer - March 12th, 2009 - Investor's Business Daily

Last week, the White House invited me to a signing ceremony overturning the Bush (43) executive order on stem cell research.

I assume this was because I have long argued in these columns and during my five years on the President's Council on Bioethics that, contrary to the Bush policy, federal funding should be extended to research on embryonic stem cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics.

I declined to attend. Once you show your face at these things you become a tacit endorser of whatever they spring. My caution was vindicated.

[snip]

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values."

Unlike Dr. Krauthammer, I think of myself as a religious man. I am guided by a belief that the moral precepts that condition mankind came from other than selfish personal interest. We are guided by a higher power which makes us better, when we try. Being a Doctor and a Psychologist, I think that Dr. Krauthammer has more than a little appreciation for how complex is both the human body and the human mind. That suggests why he can express admiration for George Bush's position on embryonic stem cell research, even when it does not match his own. Bush clearly used his mind to attempt a serious treatment of the stem cell dilema.

Dr. Krauthammer's assessment of Barack Obama having "the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism" is exactly the same assessment I have of the man's opinion of himself. It is curious how two people coming from totally different directions could reach the same view of someone as complex as Obama.

However, though the above is how Obama likes to see himself, I do not think that Obama is honest in his own assessment of himself. I think like so many liberals, he actually does have a God. His God, like the God of most liberals, is political power. He may interpret it as pragmatism, however it is much more selfish than that. Obama worships power. That is why he seems so delighted with his current position. He is the most powerful person in the world and he can flaunt this power in any way he chooses. That may give Obama some reason to see the future with hope, but it should not give hope to anyone with a conscience.

I am intensely afraid of someone like Obama, not because he is immoral, but because he is an amoral narcissist. His thoughts and comments on the complex moral dilema of abortion and stem cell research are infantile, because he has not bothered to think about them. He accepts liberal dogma and spews it out as if it is intellectually serious just because he says it.

Here's What's Happening To The Economy

by Randall Hoven - March 12, 2009 - American Thinker

What we have is a four-tiered avalanche.

Tier 1. The US housing market was a bubble that burst ...
Tier 2. That led to a global financial crisis because so many investment and insurance firms around the world traded in mortgage-backed derivatives that no one understood ...
Tier 3. That financial crisis led to an over-reaction on the part of politicians. The TARP legislation in the US in particular provided the double-whammy of being largely ineffective in its own right, and signaling to investors everywhere that it is time to panic ...
Tier 4. And that led to the political meltdown in the US, in which a socialist agenda is being implemented as quickly as possible, in the name of crisis management ...

At each step, the markets gave us an estimate of the damage done.

It is always useful to look back at a crisis but you have to wait until it is over to look "back". With the market uptick the day before yesterday, it is hopeful that the worst of the damage is behind us. Before we look forward, a debriefing on the recent history is well worth while, so we can start to put it in perspective. This article is a good review.

Separating the tendency to try and assign blame from the facts behind them, it is clear that the triggers were; a housing collapse, a derivatives collapse, political panic by the Bush regime and finally market reaction to the Obama regime solutions to the economic panic.

The housing collapse is appearing more and more likely a direct result of government interference in the market to pressure banks to make "minority" loans, coupled with a housing industry use of the new rules to loan a huge amount of funds to home refinances with the same insecure standards. The boom in prices collapsed leaving at least 5% to 6% of all housing under water. Foreclosures skyrocketed. Whether you agree that Democrats caused the crisis or not, it is totally false to argue the problem was an unregulated housing market as the Democrats continue to claim. That claim is deceitful.

The attention to the collapse of home prices made it clear to many investors that the derivatives assumption of home prices going up forever meant the entire complex derivatives market was a house of cards. Derivatives collapsed as a result of the home price collapse - damaging many insurers - with focus on the huge AIG. It also severely damaged investment banks around the world, including the recently created investment banks in America (formerly known here as security firms).

The timing of this is what many people still question. This was the collapse that was just too convenient. It came just as McCain-Palin caught the Obama-Biden ticket in the polls and ended that surge. The Bush reaction was the next huge move in the economic collapse, as Paulson, Bernanke and Bush ran around talking panic like a trio of chicken little idiots screaming the usual "the sky is falling ..." By their actions they scared the economic community and the populace. They did this only a month before the election. Was panic called for or was it, as Randall Hoven argues, a useless reaction to an economic condition that had already been priced into the market? That question will be at the heart of endless soul searching over the few years.

What came next was predictable, given the crisis reaction of the Bush regime. The American people watched the Republican regime panic and appear out of control. With no time to decipher the totality of the crisis, they turned to the opposition party to get us out of the crisis. In the last month before the election, the late deciders decisively chose the Democrats, giving them nearly total control of our government.

Obama had his opportunity. He has used it to push for socialist solutions to our crisis. With Democrat control of congress for two years, they were organized and ready to crush Republican opposition. The timing could not have been worse for anyone who fears socialism is a bad move. Democrats have made huge progress in driving our nation to socialism. The market reaction to Obama and that socialist move has been entirely negative. The American people seem stunned and still hopeful that Obama and the Democrats will end the crisis, not make it worse.

If we have reached bottom, will America blame the precipitous fall in market prices on free enterprise or the Democrats? That is the billion dollar question whose answer will determine if America stays free or not.

Obama And The Disunited States

by Andrew Walden - March 8th, 2009 - American Thinker

President Obama's rise caps forty years of building new 'nations' from one America, as America's left adapted to the rise of civil rights, and built a power base from fanning discontent.

People are always curious how the many disconnected groups of the Democrat Party stick together. This article explains some of that cohesion. It is cohesion of the shared desire to rule a socialist state. This desire is real. Americans sometimes have little concern for the intellectual foundation of this urge to rule others. They just want to be left alone. However we have got to rouse people to a more activist defense of freedom, or freedom as we have known it for more than 200 years will soon cease to exist.

Lies Of The Left

Principles and targets: When left meets right

by Frank Miele - March 8, 2009 - Daily Inter Lake

Rush Limbaugh has been criticized for saying he hopes the president fails in his efforts to reshape the economy, most recently in this newspaper by columnist Ellen Goodman, who called Limbaugh "a talk radio host who'd rather be (far) right than have his country rescued."

This kind of twisted commentary is what makes one pessimistic about the future of the country.

[snip]

Limbaugh never said he didn't want Obama to succeed in 'rescuing" the United States; instead he said that he didn't want Obama to succeed in destroying the country by turning it into a European-style socialist state.

But it doesn't matter what Limbaugh really said, does it? Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals' included this unpleasant advice: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

With George W. Bush gone from the stage, another polarizing figure was needed, and Obama's team has picked out Limbaugh for the job.

That is the key point in this article, and the key point for Americans to pay attention to. Limbaugh is being smeared with lies for the specific goal of subverting America and changing our form of government from democracy to dictatorship, through evil techniques that have been publicly proclaimed by the people who are currently in power. America voted for them, but they lied when they said what they stood for.

They have published the play book by which they explained how they would use the shortcomings of democracy to destroy democracy. It is called Saul Alinksy's Rules for Radicals. If we cannot get more of America's voters to pay attention, these radical socialists are going to win. It is important to remember that socialism is always about making people live in the way that the rulers of the socialist state believe makes you a good citizen. You are not permitted to believe anything that contradicts them.

The attacks on Rush Limbaugh are lies. Whether you agree with Limbaugh of not, you better support him, or you will shortly live in a nation where criticism of government is prohibited. That is the reality of what socialism means.

Three More Obama Nominees Withdraw

by Toby Harnden - March 6th, 2009 - London Telegraph

After a transition period that was hailed as one of the smoothest and best organised in the past two decades, Mr Obama has struggled to fill key posts amid signs of chaotic decision making and inadequate vetting.

He has lost two Commerce Secretary nominees – Governor Bill Richardson, who became embroiled in a corruption scandal and Senator Judd Gregg, a Republican who turned against Mr Obama's spending plans.

Nancy Killefer, chosen to be "chief performance officer", pulled out over unpaid taxes while General Anthony Zinni was told he would be ambassador to Baghdad only to learn that a diplomat had been appointed to fill the slot but no one had bothered to tell him.

According to the White House Transition Project, which tracks appointments, there are some 1,200 government jobs that require Senate confirmation about 360 of which are considered policy jobs. Only about 70 of those jobs have been filled so far.

Perhaps someone should have noted that the transition was organized by the outgoing Republican administration, not Obama. No one in the MSM ever suggested that the smooth tansition was a result of outgoing professionals in positions of responsibilty answering any and all questions Obama's people asked, but it was. The information was available quickly because these Republicans knew what they were doing. George W. Bush had ordered them to cooperate, and they did, magnificently.

Of course the press just raved about how smoothly the incoming amateurs handled the transition, because there was no way that they were ever going to give Republicans credit for anything.

Now that the transition is over and the Republicans are gone? The entire process has collapsed into a Chinese fire drill. Or is it politically incorrect to use that old expression? I am sure that the incompetence that Obama and his people are displaying will be ignored while someone takes me to task for using an "insulting" expression. My bad!

Incredibly, 60% of Americans are "impressed" with Obama and think he is doing a good job. The press never allows them to hear anything else. I don't know what is funnier ... or more incompetent; Obama, or the American majority that are abandoning the precepts that made us great and rich and free.

Obama Despises Winston Churchill

Updated March 7th, 2009

Churchill, Obama and Bush

by Diana West - March 5th, 2009 - Townhall.com

There were three busts in the Oval Office during the Bush Presidency, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower. Two of them are gone. Only lincoln is still there. Eisenhower is just gone and no one knows where. The last, the Churchill bust, was returned to England in a way to insult our British friends. Do you know why?

President Obama indicated he wanted the bust out of the Oval Office, indeed, out of the White House, he sent a much more significant message. Namely, he demonstrated how completely our world has turned.

The London Telegraph attempted an explanation: "Churchill has less happy connotations for Mr. Obama than those American politicians who celebrate his wartime leadership. It was during Churchill's second premiership that Britain suppressed Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion. Among Kenyans allegedly tortured by the colonial regime included one Hussein Onyango Obama, the President's grandfather."

In other words, such family lore is supposed to render the British titan who roused the Free World against Nazi Germany and warned the Free World against the Communist U.S.S.R. as popular with the new president as Guantanamo Bay. For the record, though, the Mau Mau story is a historic impossibility, at least according to the known timeline of events.

Did you know that Barack Obama despises Winston Churchill? Obama is so supportive of his grandmother's version of history, an impossible version, that he casually insulted our most important ally. Most important ally at least prior to the ascendancy of Barack Obama. The key point though is that Obama is wrong about the history on which he bases his hate.

There is another explanation for his despising Churchill.

Having achieved a Washington-like apotheosis in the American imagination, Churchill serves not only as the preeminent symbol of resolve, courage and faith against the enemies of Western civilization. He serves as a symbol of Western civilization, period. One of President Obama's first acts as president was to consign that symbol to a box and send it packing.

Barack Obama is filled with more hate than any President since Nixon. I wonder just how many Obama supporters really know this man? He despises Western Civilization. He does not see England as the nation of William "Wilbur" Wilberforce and the abolitionist movement which ended slavery throughout most of the world. Obama sees England, and Western Civilization, as the major force for evil in the world.

His overall views would surprise most of his supporters. He hates honkeys because he is a racist, but he doesn't let us know it. He hates America because he opposes free enterprise, but he doesn't let us know it. He hates Churchill because he believes lies about Western Civilization, but he doesn't let us know it.

Barack Hussein Obama is a stealth candidate of hate for most of what has made America and Western Civilization great. However he does not show his hate. He hides it behind a mild mannered smile. It is frightening how little his supporters really know about this man they have elevated to the most powerful position in the world.

Additional comments
As a footnote to Obama's hatred for Western civilization, there is no better irony than the incompetence Obama showed in his first diplomatic interaction with this most civilized nation. The article London aghast at President Obama over gifts given to Prime Minister Brown pretty much describes Obama's bumbling stupidity in handling a meeting with a man who is a supporter! This matches well with his bumbling asking for Russian support against Iran while abandoning our allies on the missles for Eastern Europe. Obama is not just a hard left ideologue. He is an amateur and arrogant ideologue.

One In Five U.S. Mortgage Borrowers Are Underwater

by Jonathan Stempel - March 4th, 2009 - Reuters

About 8.3 million properties had negative equity at the end of 2008, up 9 percent from 7.6 million at the end of September, according to the study, released Wednesday by First American CoreLogic. The percentage of "underwater" borrowers rose to 20 percent from 18 percent.

Sounds bad but it is misleading. There are 30.6 million homes owned free and clear, with no mortgage at all. That is 38% of total homes. So the total of homes NOT underwater is 72.2 million, not the 41.6 stated in the article. Total homes are 80.5 million of which approximately 12% have loans exceeding their value, not the 20% quoted in the article.

The numerous articles in the MSM which leave out the homes owned free and clear do so in a blatant attempt to make the problem sound worse than it is. It is also true that nearly half the homes underwater are still not in danger of foreclosure. Once again the MSM always uses numbers that make the problem sound as bad as possible. Looked at objectively, there is no reason that we should be pouring taxpayer money into bailing out these homeowners. Looked at objectively, it is a recent problem and is more manageable than it first appears.




As you can see from the graph above, home prices have never varried much from a very stable trend line, until the last five years when a huge spike created the current crisis.

The problem is not uniformly scattered througout our nation either. The homes in foreclosure are concentrated in just five states, as validated in the article here.

Another reason that we should not be bailing out the people who are in trouble is that they are overwhelmingly refinancers, not new buyers. Few sub-prime mortgages went to new purchasers of homes. The money from the loan went directly into the pockets of the people who now are not making payments on their loans. Why should we bail out people who got rich refinancing their homes in the five states where values skyrocketed the most due to the boom. They got the money and now taxpayers in other parts of the nation are going to pay it back? How is that justice?

There are a small percentage of people in the states where the prices ballooned up, who were first time buyers damaged by the economy. We should be focusing our efforts on them, not the huge banks that created the sub-prime mess.

What Are “The People” Thinking

... As 546 Political Pigs Destroy Their Nation?

by J.B. Williams - March 3rd, 2009 - Canada Free Press

I don’t care what political party you think you belong to. If you are not willing to stand and fight for personal freedom and individual liberty, the fundamental unalienable rights which our Founders established as gifts from our Creator, then you my friend are NOT American…

If you are American, then no matter what party you think represents you in Washington DC, I’m here to tell you that nobody in Washington DC represents you today. We have 546 idiots running legislative roughshod over 310 million American citizens and it appears that the average American has either not figured this out yet, has no idea what to do about it, or has entirely lost their will to be free.

Every American needs to read the facts about how we got in this mess and who put us here. On January 28, 2009, I released a column titled Congressional Democrats Bankrupted the Nation. If you don’t know this already, then read the column. That’s why I wrote it; so that American citizens would know what went wrong and who is really responsible for it. If you don’t know who or what is wrong, you can’t fix it.

It took leftists just under a hundred years to accomplish it. You have only days or weeks to reverse it ...

Depressing article. Even more depressing because I am afraid that it is true. America is not even paying attention as the socialists of the Democrat Party tear down free enterprise and erect a socialist state that will "force" (Barack Obama's favorite word) Americans to live the way government bureaucrats want them to live.

Every time I see the grinning face of our new President as he blithely tells another lie, I wonder how long will it be before people see through this charlatan. Then I wonder if it is already too late?

These are depressing and troublesome times. Freedom requires a people who want to be free. I wonder whether that actually describes Americans any more?

Obama Cancels Press Conference With Gordon Brown "Because Of Snow"

by Toby Harnden - March 3rd, 2009 - London Telegraph

Snow?

ROTFL

Strange goings on surrounding the programme for the first day of Gordon Brown's visit to Washington.

No sooner had the Prime Minister's plane touched down at Andrews Air Force on Monday evening when word was passed to travelling Westminster correspondents that the press conference they'd been told to expect had been called off "because of snow".

I am not exactly sure what Barack Obama thinks he accomplishes by insulting the leader of our strongest and most reliable ally, Great Britain. As noted in the article, he has a really important meeting with the Boy Scouts of America scheduled for the day, so maybe it is just a matter of timing. [grin]

Sorry. It is hard to keep a straight face when talking about Obama. This hard core anti-American socialist still has the majority of moderates bamboozled about his true intentions, but he is making so many stupid mistakes that he can't keep up the pretense much longer. His narcissism simply does not permit him to care what others think.

He is attacking America with class warfare and liberal extremism and at some point the moderates are going to wake up. What do you think. Will it be before or after he has created a second great depression?

Just asking.

Time to Get Mean?

by C. Edmund Wright - March 2nd, 2009 - American Thinker

"Now remember, things look bad and it looks like you're not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. 'Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That's just the way it is." - The Outlaw Josey Wales

These words of the Outlaw Josey Wales, given life by Clint Eastwood, should be engraved on a huge sign in the offices of the Republican Party. Or somewhere. Anywhere that there might be a gathering of folks ready to fight for our country.

Great article. Great analogy. Must read article of the day.

Power Of Life And Death Is In Our Words

by Thomas Sowell - March 2nd, 2009 - Investor's Business Daily

Do not for one moment think that we are either intellectually or morally superior to those Germans who put Hitler in power. We have been saved by our institutions and our traditions — the very institutions and traditions that so many are so busy eroding or dismantling, whether in classrooms or courtrooms or in the halls of Congress and the White House.

Words matter. This is good advice from one of the smartest, if not the smartest, man in America.

Air Regulators Show No Letup

... In Their War On Emissions

by Michael Gardner - March 2nd, 2009 - San Diego Union-Tribune

California's air-quality regulators are on an accelerated schedule to adopt a series of global warming initiatives considered unmatched worldwide. Their aggressive push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming will eventually touch everyday life in both small and significant ways.

Just Thursday, the state Air Resources Board moved to regulate fluorinated gases commonly used by the Silicon Valley-centered semiconductor industry to make chips used in cell phones and computers.

A few weeks earlier, do-it-yourself mechanics were the target.

There are two facts of significance in this bureaucratic crusade. California has, with an aggressive cycle of new laws every decade since the 1960s, eliminated over 99% of the human created pollution within the state already. They are chasing a small part of 1% of the human caused emissions that are left. In addition, there is no PROOF that anything that they are doing will help in any way.

They deny that there is a huge scientific argument about anthropogenic global warming because they do NOT CARE whether it is true or not. They are on a quest for power. Not a quest to save the air. Air quality in California is such a minor issue today that in order to create a crisis they have repeatedly changed the rules. A critical air quality warning today was not originally even on their scale. Why did they change? Because otherwise air quality is so imporved there would no longer be warnings!

The real goal is a cap-and-trade system that will allow government to dictate all actions of all business, the socialist Utopian dream. Such a goal has been well published as the true goal of rabid environmentalists for years. It is only a secret from people who never read their literature.

The only thing that you need to remember is that CO2 is considered the worst pollutant and you are breathing out CO2 as you read this article. Considering how extremist these people have become, can you not see the day when who gets to live or die is regulated by them. How else can they stop you from breathing out this pollutant?

The truth is that CO2 is NOT a pollutant. It is a necessary component of life. Their labeling it a pollutant and "greenhouse gas" is a total and complete fraud.

Newt. Again.

by Matt Bai - February 25, 2009 - New York Times

It is not likely that an article that made it in to the New York Times would in any way be a positive article for Americans as opposed to socialists. It is clearly designed to portray Barack Obama as a moderate. It covers the period right after the election when I started to become enraged at my party due to its adopting the ridiculous idea that pretending Obama was not a socialist was a good strategy. Newt Gingrich was one of the advocates of that strategy.

Gingrich, who likes to reduce the world to binary options, saw two basic paths for Obama: either he was going to cater to interest groups and his Congressional wing, or he was going to take a more centrist, more reformist approach to governing.

If he chose Door No. 1, then Republicans had to propose a thoughtful, alternate agenda of their own. “Screaming ‘No!’ is just not a strategy,” Gingrich told me. But he said he was betting that Obama would take the second approach — that he meant what he said about leaving the old doctrines behind and intended to govern in a way that might fundamentally realign American politics. And if that were the case, Gingrich reasoned, not only would it be politically unpalatable to stand in Obama’s way, but chances were he would soon face serious fractures within his own party and would need to create a broader coalition of partners to get his initiatives through the Congress.

In other words, Gingrich wasn’t suggesting to Cantor and the others that they should simply pretend to like Obama well enough. He was telling them that if Obama was going to move far enough in their direction, their best play — and maybe their only play — was actually to team up with him on legislation if they could.

I was outraged that anyone would think that opposing socialism was simply a myopic attempt to obstruct. I never bought the idea that Obama was the moderate he pretended to be. I have read Alinsky. His pretense at moderation was a con and Newt was among a great number of Republicans who bought in to the con. I guess in all his reading Newt missed Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Perhaps if he had read it he would not have been deluded into thinking that Obama was ever going to be moderate.

Obama's sky high ratings are partially due to the constant early days reference to anything he did as moderate by Republicans, as if they could woo this hard core socialist into a moderate governing posture by being nice to him. To the independents that were nervous about their votes, the Republicans gave them confidence they had not screwed up with their vote. The problem is that independents are among that large part of the populace that only listen for a short time, make up their minds, and then tune out politics for a couple of years. At a time when it was critical, Republicans assured the American people that Obama was moderate. Now it is too late to say anything different and be heard.

Obama gave the Republicans no chance of working together by proving through his actions he was never going to be a moderate. Obama made the so-called stimulus bill a monstrous swerve left. Even though many papers, among them the New York Times (as repeated in this article), made the argument that disagreement was simply "obstructing" what was needed for our nation.

This is a very long article, that delves into what Newt is doing and attempts to set him up as the best Republican candidate for President in 2012. Just as the Times worked hard to get McCain as the candidate for 2008, they will abandon Newt in a second once he has the nomination. If he was running against Obama, I could vote for Newt. However he is far from being a good choice for anyone among us who believes in individual freedom. Newt would accept socialism in a minute if the American people wanted it. To him it is not an issue of principle but of governing. Newt will support anything that the majority of people support.

Even his contract with America proved that.

Economy In Shambles Buffett Still Optimistic

by Staff - March 2nd, 2009 - Moneynews

Warren Buffett says the economic turmoil that contributed to a 62 percent profit drop last year at the holding company he controls is certain to continue in 2009, but the revered investor remains optimistic.

Buffett released his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholders Saturday morning, and detailed the worst of his 44 years leading the Omaha-based company.

Does that optimism explain why he backed Barack Obama for President or is it vice versa? The article documents more stupid decisions by Buffett this year than he has made in the last decade. Both Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are convinced that socialism is the wave of the future. Both have abandoned free enterprise for the crony capitalism of Robert Rubin and the other left wing economic evangelists. To date this crony capitalism has a poor track record.

The big manipulative Wall Street investment bankers which Rubin helped create have done nothing to date except drive the Tech boom of the 90s into a huge bust and drive the home boom of earlier this decade into a huge bust. To date their track record is one of disaster.

Why has Buffett suddenly changed from the conservative investor of his youth, banking on picking winning companies, into the radical investor of today, picking hypothetically winning "strategies"? Anyone with a brain had to see that derivatives were not predictable. However Buffett, just like all the other people who think of themselves as geniuses, could not resist proving that he could figure out derivatives and make money on them. He hasn't.

Buffett picked Obama even as he picked a ton of investment losers this last year. I think it will be ironic if having picked Obama, he can no longer pick good companies and make money on them because Obama taxes productive companies to oblivion. How can Buffett back someone for President who plans to end the great economic system that he prospered under? How can he still remain optimistic? Or is he conning us? did he realize that Obama was going to destroy free enterprise? Is it his desire to assure that no one else can ever come along and prosper as he did? Is backing Obama the way Bill Gates and Warren Buffett assure they go down in history as the last great entrepreneurs?

I think anyone who trusts either of these two people is being conned based on old news. They are not great entrepreneurs any longer. They are socialists. I wonder who these two will support in 2010?

If consevatives were anything like liberals, the bumber sticker for 2010 is already written:

Obama Lied - My Job Died.